Les Blank, who filmed life's eccentricities, dies at 77

New York Times :
April 8, 2013
: Updated: April 9, 2013 11:58am

Les Blank, whose sly, sensuous and lyrical documentaries about regional music and a host of other idiosyncratic subjects, including Mardi Gras, gap-toothed women, garlic and the filmmaker Werner Herzog, were widely admired by critics and other filmmakers if not widely known by moviegoers, died Sunday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 77.

And his films are hardly standard documentary fare, dominated by archival footage and interviews with talking heads; nor are they of the Frederick Wiseman-D.A. Pennebaker fly-on-the-wall expose school. Rather, the films, most of them less than an hour long, are “brilliantly sympathetic, well-crafted essays,” as John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times in 1979, rife with deftly framed portraiture, cunningly observed social scenes, beautiful nature photography and the poetic juxtaposition of imagery and sound.

“I think he's a national treasure,” the director Taylor Hackford said in a telephone interview. “Although his films are not well known at the moment, they'll take their place. Films are great when they live a long time, and I think Les' will live.”

Blank trolled for subject matter on the American periphery, in cultural pockets where the tradition is long but the exposure limited. His films often have a geographic as well as cultural specificity, and food and music are often the featured elements. His musical subjects included norteno bands of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Cajun fiddlers of Louisiana and polka enthusiasts from across the country.

“You could call him an ethnographer; you could call him an ethnomusicologist or an anthropologist,” Hackford said. “He was interested in certain cultures that Americans are unaware of. He shot what he wanted, captured it beautifully, and those subjects are now gone. The homogenization of American culture has obliterated it.”

Blank achieved a kind of intimacy in his work that suggested the camera had been unobtrusive, or perhaps a welcome guest. Blank sometimes lived among the people he was filming for weeks at a time.

Leslie Harrod Blank Jr. was born on Nov. 27, 1935, in Tampa, Fla., where his father was a real estate developer. He went to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Tulane University, where he majored in English and aspired to be a writer. He briefly attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, and flirted with the idea of becoming a Navy pilot before he saw the Ingmar Bergman film “The Seventh Seal,” which piqued his interest in making movies. He formed a production company, Flower Films, in 1967.

Blank was married and divorced three times. In addition to his son Harrod, whose full name is Leslie Harrod Blank III, he is survived by a daughter, Ferris Robinson; another son, Beau Blank; and three grandchildren.